ZymoGenetics has established a formidable research program to ensure that exciting discoveries of potentially valuable new therapeutic protein drugs will continue to occur here.

Over the past few years, our approach to discovery of new product candidates has evolved. In the mid-1990’s, we developed an advanced bioinformatics platform and focused our research strategy on the discovery of novel genes and proteins within key protein families that had known members with demonstrated therapeutic potential or medically-relevant biological activity. These discovery efforts resulted in several product candidates that are currently a part of our clinical development portfolio (IL-21, PEG-Inteferon lambda) and others that are still in preclinical research.

Recently, we shifted our early discovery efforts to antibodies and antibody-like molecules with inhibitory activity in validated biological pathways, where the biology suggests a straightforward approach to clinical development. We continue to develop our antibody capabilities to allow the development of single molecules that can target multiple biological pathways (i.e., bispecific molecules). We believe our bispecific platform provides a means to develop more efficacious therapeutics with potentially greater specificity. Our first bispecific molecules are expected to move into clinical development in 2009.